Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Laura Wiess captures the visceral emotion of a girl’s journey from innocence to devastating loss and, ultimately, to a strange and unexpected kind of understanding—in this beautiful and painfully honest new novel.

Are there any answers when someone you love makes a tragic choice?

Before and After. That’s how Rowan Areno sees her life now. Before: she was a normal sixteen-year-old—a little too sheltered by her police officer father and her mother. After: everything she once believed has been destroyed in the wake of a shattering tragedy, and every day is there to be survived.

If she had known, on that Friday in March when she cut school, that a random stranger’s shocking crime would have traumatic consequences, she never would have left campus. If the crime video never went viral, maybe she could have saved her mother, grandmother — and herself — from the endless replay of heartache and grief.

Finding a soul mate in Eli, a witness to the crime who is haunted by losses of his own, Rowan begins to see there is no simple, straightforward path to healing wounded hearts. Can she learn to trust, hope, and believe in happiness again?I have really enjoyed Laura Wiess's previous work. I just click with her writing: languid prose that builds atmosphere and characters that are real and nuanced and compelling. Plus, she always has a sweet dose of swoon <3The opening on Me Since You grabs your attention and holds it tight. Rowan's police father responds to an emergency call where lives hang in the balance. It's adrenalin fueled and emotive and left me feeling stunned and bereft. From there the story builds, exploring the fall-out from a major event gone wrong. And the fall-out just keeps growing and twisting around. It was interesting premise with so many angles to explore. Mostly the reader she's this through Rowan's eyes, as she goes about her school, work and home life. The story takes a particular harrowing twist and Rowan is thrown deeper into a negative mental health minefield. There's grief and despair and regret and guilt and anger and disbelief and it's so perfectly captured. I greatly admire just how far down the rabbit hole Wiess explores. It's intense and all consuming. I think, as a reader, I was not prepared for that amount of harrowing grief. It translated so strongly from the page that I found myself feeling shrouded in despair as I was reading. I know it is not a book I will revisit (as it was so vivid, the grief and depression) but I really do recommend it to people who love intense emotional journeys. And, yes, there was a good amount of swoon (which really added some light to the darkness). Eli is amazing and a perfect match for Rowan's state of mind :)Me Since You @ goodreadsAvailable Feb 18 (NOW!)

Thanks MTV Books and Edelweiss for providing me with an egalley of this book